The Auricle

It's got some pretty big names behind it, e.g. Creative Commons, Internet Archive, Wikipedia, Drupal, so the open source, all volunteer, Ourmedia initiative certainly merits some serious attention. The Internet Archive's founder, Brewster Kahle, has apparently pledged to preserve any material uploaded so I guess that suggests long term viability. If you want free, and apparently permanent, storage and bandwidth for your text, rich media (videos, audio, photos), and software then this open registry/digital repository may be of some interest to you. The only caveat is that you must be prepared to share your masterpieces with a global audience. When you upload material to Ourmedia you need to select from a range of licensing options, i.e. Creative Commons, Creative Commons Sampling, GNU Public License, Mozilla Public License, Netscape Public License, Public Domain or even a traditional copyright option (albeit that your material will be posted on a public web site designed for distribution).

Now I like the Ourmedia concept a lot, but the reality of working in higher education institutions is that persuading the majority of faculty to opt for this type of totally open sharing and reuse is pretty much an uphill task. If, however, there was support for groups and communities of practice then that would be a different matter. For example, in the medical arena there's a lot of material that's of high educational value but which would be perceived as unsuited to the type of totally open distribution offered by Ourmedia. Whether this argument is valid or not, matters less than that the belief will inhibit such useful and reusable material finding its way into the likes of Ourmedia.

I haven't thought this through fully as yet but it seems to me that there's a need for 'open' repository systems which build the confidence and experience of potential depositors of material by allowing them a greater degree of control over the permissions they attach to their deposits, e.g. public, private, friends, groups, communities. I suspect that, because the potential depositor felt more in control, in the long term the quantity of quality 'public' deposits would rise as the depositors moved through a continuum of 'private/my content' to 'public/our content' thinking. There are already hosted blog solutions and image archives which adopt this model; it's what turns the prosaic tool or service into something really powerful.

Another concern that would undoubtedly be raised is that, despite the involvement of some major players with a great track record, if Ourmedia disappeared tomorrow then those who had come to depend on it's presence could be left high and dry. The counter argument of course is that lots of copies keeps stuff safe and that the more the dissemination the greater the preservation.

There are of course plenty of top-down, one-way, repositories, e.g. The British Universities Newsreel Database (BUND) as well as other sources available via the British Universities Film and Video Council site. However, whilst these official collections are an invaluable part of our cultural heritage, what Ourmedia is tapping into is the belief that the artefacts produced by 'the others' has as much value to some people as does the official polished productions of the professional media machine. Alternatively, instead of a repository model there's the Blinkx TV approach which focuses on the search side of things, but with a twist. Blinkx claims their system 'watches' TV clips from participating sources and automatically builds contextual information and so makes it possible for a user to jump to a specific point in a remote clip.

But a reliable and remotely accessible repository in which to store and share rich media resources should be a pretty powerful part of the e-learning armoury. There are other examples of such user-supported bottom-up repositories. There's the Open Video Project but they seem to have stopped taking new submissions 'due to limited staffing' (see earlier comments about such risks) and I suppose we could also consider a general learning object repository like MERLOT as part of this genre as well. What the Open Video Project 'staffing problems' perhaps suggests is that the only sustainable way is to rely less on core staffing and more on making the users responsible for maintaining their own resources or collections thereof. I see the same challenges facing the podcast community, but at least here the directory node editor model of, say, an iPodder.org, makes for a more distributed and, therefore, perhaps more sustainable approach, i.e. no one individual or group is responsible for maintaining the whole system, but merely their part of it.

Despite the caveats above I applaud the Ourmedia inititative.

Last week (11-20 March 2005) was the UK's National Science Week. It's, therefore, a bit ironic that, despite its public good/education brief, we find that the BBC can't find the funding to support The Naked Scientists. The Naked Scientists is (or is that was?) a project which, among other activities, produces a weekly live radio programme which is syndicated through parts of the BBC regional radio network. Note the emphasis on parts and regional.

The web site also offers an impressive archive of past programmes with MP3 downloads.

Although the Naked Scientists' activities have been supported by the Royal Society and Cambridge University the grant covered only travel costs and those of the NS programme guests; the team give their time for nothing. The BBC, whilst apparently happy to offer limited regional synidication of the programme produced by the NS team, have proved less willing to contribute to ongoing production costs. The original grant funding is now coming to an end and, as a result, what should be an important contribution to the public understanding of science looks like it's going to bite the dust.

In a previous Auricle article Probing Podcasting from the Professionals I highlighted how such regional programming forces initiatives such as The Naked Scientists below the radar for most of us. It's possible to compensate for this when other forms of dissemination and distribution are also used, e.g. what we now know as podcasting. However, despite offering MP3 downloads (albeit as zips which makes them podcast unfriendly), the Naked Scientists haven't yet, and now may never, tuned into the podcasting alternative.

What's a bit surprising is the BBC's apparent lack of enthusiam for grass roots initiatives such as this. They have effectively been getting a weekly science programme for nothing. Their recent Charter Review signals probably the last time that the usual arguments justifying the tax on the British public we call the Television Licence will hold sway. The corporation is going to have to go through a rapid transformation in much less than the decade before the next Charter Review. Of particular note, is that the BBC has been told to stop chasing ratings and to put it's 'public good' mission first.

Despite the above, it's interesting, however, to reflect on what the BBC's attitude to funding would have been if The Naked Scientists had been offering a 'reality' show complete with displays of celebrities' body parts or other personal physical/psychological/social relevations.

Perhaps one of the problems is that the mainstream broadcasters have difficulty in coping with productions which come from left field? Whilst most broadcasters make a nod to community participation in production by offering 3-5 minute special interest slots in their busy schedules they seem to have more difficulty in allocating the time for full programmes.

I suspect that the mainstream broadcasters are hobbled by the same mindset as the big record companies and, increasingly, their software company partners. The latter resolutely ignores the independent music sector whilst they continue to focus on methods of distributing the outputs of their stable of mainstream artists and restricting the rights of their consumers via their multifarious digital rights systems which 'lock', 'block', or 'clock'.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the independent music sector begins to develop its own distribution channels and communities. Much the same is beginning to happen to radio since relative modest investment is necessary to produce and distribute 'radio' programmes via the internet. Ok, some of these productions are of variable quality, but some are as good as you will hear on broadcast radio or are good enough for the needs of their audiences. On the video and television front, it's even likely that that, within the next few years, independent production companies could be offering their outputs via the internet.

So my advice to The Naked Scientists? There is already an alternative to the traditional broadcast model and most of us who are using time shifting devices ain't listening to the programme live anyway. And the BBC? Come on, this isn't going to cost you a fortune and you could then use this type of involvment as part of the justification for why at least a variant of the Licence Fee should continue at your next Charter Review.

It would be a real shame to see The Naked Scientists left exposed like this.

As major broadcasters like the BBC and CBC dip their toes tentatively into the podcast thing others are abandoning broadcast in favour of the podcast. The Webtalk Radio Show which was syndicated over a number of US FM Stations has jumped the broadcast ship and will now reach its audience only via podcasts or streaming servers. Freedom from regulatory interference was one reason cited for the jump. In their 5 March 2005 podcast, Webtalk highlight how Viacom, a global media empire, have downgraded their overall company value by USD 17 billion with 10 billion of that being their radio assets which they didn't think had the growth potential any more. The Webtalk message seems to be that terrestrial, non digital plain old radio is dying (ok changing) although topical local programming will continue to thrive with, for example, ultra low power FM stations casting to a highly defined part of a town or city. The bandwith so released could, however, be refocused to local or even national data services, e.g. existing local radio stations as ultra broadband distributors/suppliers?

So here it is, HEFCE's 10 year framework for e-learning in UK Higher Education (with three year reviews). The strategy has managed to incorporate all of the key concepts; from tools which enable student management of their own learning and personal learning environments on the one hand to VLEs on the other, and then mentions of interoperability, open source software, and peer-to-peer solutions. And partnership is the name of the game, so no more UKeUs are in the offing. So everyone should be happy … shouldn't they? You can access the HEFCE e-learning strategy here or, for the terminally time poor, here is my concept list extracted from my first reading:

• embed
• develop
• sustainability
• evidence
• pedagogic opportunities
• student focused
• flexible learning
• workplace learning
• benchmarking tools
• pathfinder projects
• partnerships (no more UKeUs)
• seven implementation strands
  1. pedagogy curriculum design and development
  2. learning resources and networked learning
  3. student support, progression and collaboration
  4. strategic management, human resources and capacity development
  5. quality,
  6. research and evaluation
  7. infrastructure and technical standards
• virtual national e-learning advisory and support centre
• continuous review and refinement
• no hard targets
• tools for tutors
• coherence and collaboration
• sharing within subject communities
• integrating registration and learning
• reward structures
• digital resources and discovery tools
• HEA, JISC, CETLs, FDTL
• what's the human capacity in the HE sector to deliver further e-learning growth?
• kite marking resources
• MLEs, VLEs
• personal learning environments
• interoperability
• open source software
• peer-to-peer solutions

But my weasel word extractor also finds words like:

“aim to …” and “seek to”. Such words always leave the reader with a sense of 'maybe', 'perhaps', 'if we're allowed to', 'if we're lucky', or 'not quite sure, but we've got our fingers crossed'

On the other hand, it's great to find statements like:

“Encourage the design of technology for students to manage their own individual and shared learning”

But we will need to watch that earlier statements in the document about 'integrating registration and learning' and '… integration and access to virtual learning environments across schools, further education and HE' doesn't just translate into more wall-to-wall proprietary VLE usage. Has your local primary school signed up for Blackboard yet?

Our current VLE centric view of e-learning is a quantum leap from students 'managing their own individual and shared learning'. HEFCE will do us all a terrible dis-service if their strategy is allowed to resolve into more of what we've broadly got at the moment. We need to broaden our concept of a VLE pronto … As a start to this process see Scot Wilson's visualization of the Future VLE.

It's also great to see some emphasis on personal learning environments, interoperable resources and learning material, and peer-to-peer solutions. But, again, I perceive a potential conflict with the MLE/VLE centric view of the world … or at least the current implementations of VLEs in which so many have invested so much that they will defend their corners (or jobs) to the death.

HEFCE, JISC, the HEA and all of us involved in e-learning really need to expend more effort in broadening the HE community's understanding of what an effective online learning environment needs to be … and it ain't what we've got at the moment.

HEFCE, sensibly, has built in review points so it should be possible to adjust the policies in line with the inevitable changes that will occur over a decade. In a world where the pace of technological change, obsolescence, and opportunity can be measured in months, a strategy fixed in stone is not a strategy at all.

One of the key challenges that HEIs will face over the next decade is how the development and implementation of their strategies can adapt to new circumstances, opportunities and technologies. It seems to me that many institutions are hell bent on creating apparently stable, but inflexible, e-learning infrastructures which sometimes are less to do with learning and teaching and more to do with command and control.

It's already happening, but over the next decade, students and faculty are increasingly going to expect the richness and diversity of functionality and content they are exposed to over the internet to be present also where they work and learn. Our current way of thinking, for all but the lucky few, can easily lead to institutional e-learning provision which can be just … well .. so uninspiring and is, in reality, just a mechanism for disseminating content. So, if we don't get our thinking skates on, we'll continue to create our walled gardens which will be ever so secure but, meanwhile, any student or faculty with a grain of knowledge will be exploiting the RSS/Atom aggregators, search engines, content repositories, and social networking software outside the walled garden, leaving the institutional provision behind like a desolate Chernobyl which once produced useful power, but which also delivered a terrible sting in the tail.

Anyway, credit to HEFCE for trying to please everyone. But, like most strategies, what matters is implementation, and that my friends is open to the interpretation of you all. May your god or belief system make you wise!

CETISs' Scott Wilson is proving himself an excellent reflective practitioner and communicator via what he calls his 'workblog'. In Frameworks: Work in Progress (18 January 2005) he opines:

“I think the ELF should be less about 'architecture' per se than about creating a community that communicates design concepts; a place where we can share ideas about how capabilites can be realized - an opportunity to converge naturally on common approaches and patterns of solutions. This is much more difficult than a few people making top-down design decisions, and this is going to require a lot more effort, especially as government agencies are involved.” Note particularly, that 'converge naturally', 'top down design decisions', and 'government agencies are involved'.

If I'm reading the message in Scott's narrative correctly he's alerting us to the danger of the ELF becoming a just another attempt at a top down architecture where a 'few' end up making decisions that the 'many' find wanting in practice. Having said that if the ELF had existed way back in the mide to late 1990s then we all would probably have been able to have more sensible discussions, and made better decisions about what's needed to faciliate learning and teaching online, rather than locking our thinking and practice into the MLE/VLE mindset that so bedevils us now. As yesterday's Auricle pointer to Scott's article Future VLE - The Visual Version shows, CETIS shows that it is 'thinking out of the envelope'. It's reassuring to know that they can ask challenging questions even of themselves.

We're participating in a small way to populating the ELF and I can tell you it's hard to plug in to an architecture which in reality is a 'statement of intent', a vision, a conceptual framework or whatever your favourite descriptor may be. Nevertheless, I would like to see it succeed but I've got a hunch implementations based on the ELF will end up closer to Scott Wilson's syndicated vision which makes use of RSS, FOAF, et al, rather than just a tight set of well defined Web Services or even web services. Yes, Web Services will be there but they will be part of the mix not the mix.

Thanks to Brian Kelly of UKOLN for the pointer. What a breath of fresh air. Scott Wilson's visualization of a future VLE is a 'must see' and about as far from what we've currently got as a Pterodactyl is from a Golden Eagle.

The Candadian Broadcasting Corporation's new pilot podcasting project is welcome, but oh! so conservative. Readers of my previous Auricle article Probing podcasting from the professionals will know that one of the CBC shows, Tod Maffin's /Nerd has actually been available for a while and the other CBC show, the science programme Quirks and Quarks, already had an extensive MP3 archive; so all CBC seem to have done is add the RSS wrappers and ramp up the PR. Anyway, let's not be churlish, give us more! more! more!.

But what's the BBC doing on the podcasting front? The Beeb's current offering, In Our Time, worthy programme although it is, is hardly going to set the podcast world on fire. So come on! BBC, you should also pick up the pace and set an example. You never know, you might find a whole lot of talent out there, who, with modest resources, could do a pretty good job, e.g. those Naked Scientists for instance?

What my brief sampling of the podcasting world has shown me is that, while there is certainly some dross 'out there', there's also some audio resources of surprising innovation and quality. Sometimes the dross and the gold come from the same podcasters on different days. Whilst my interests lie in the talk radio genre, I've also found some of the so called podcast safe music to be high quality. It's perhaps notable that my teenage daughter seems to pay more attention to this type of music than she does to putative chart toppers … Quick quick record companies you'd better find a way of banning podcasts:) Why not attempt to do the same fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) job as was attempted with open source software? … Why not declare listening or contributing to podcasts as evidence of communist leanings and, therefore, of unpatriotic behaviour? 🙂

We've been picking up the vibes about Bangor for many weeks but the Guardian article of 16 Feb last summarizes it pretty well. Eight librarian's heads are on the chopping block because:

“The support to the academic and student communities from the qualified subject librarians, whatever its contribution to the teaching and research roles of the institution, is hard to justify in value-for-money terms at a time when the process of literature searches is substantially deskilled by online bibliographical resources.” So what does this tell knowledge workers whose organizations want to capture what they know?

If Bangor proceeds with its decision they are sure betting a lot. I hope they realize they are about to become the ultimate case study.

But let's be mindful that universities aren't shoe factories where the effect of organizational changes on 'production' can be felt pretty well immediately. Even changes which ultimately prove destructive will take some time to show and rise above the 'spin'. The author of the 'hard to justify' paragraph needs to remain in the spotlight so that they can be held to account … whatever the result.

In February 2004, Auricle initiated a series of articles The Weblog as the Model for a New Type of VLE? based on the contention that the weblog perhaps offered us the basis of a new type of online learning environment; an environment where dynamic communication and knowledge/resource sharing was key. Well I'm back to this theme because there's now at least one emergent example of what I meant. For those readers wishing to revisit the earlier postings on this theme the MLE/VLE/Portals section of our View by Category page provides quick access.

Lisa Williams recent article ePortfolios, but not as we know them caught my attention and Lisa reinforced my interest by sending me an email invitation to join her in the Learning Landscape proof-of-concept implementation by the University of Edinburgh's David Tosh and Ben Werdmuller … called mysteriously ELGG.

So I duly registered with ELGG and found myself in an environment which, I believe, shows considerable promise.

So how does the rather abstract concept of a Learning Landscape translate into concrete form? An extreme simplification of ELGG could identify four key ingredients: a weblog, social networking, syndication, and resource sharing.

The weblog functionality of ELGG could mature into an attractive solution for institutions or organisations seeking to set up their open-source hosted weblog solution but by giving users the ability to self define who are their 'friends' and 'groups' and eventually 'communities' makes ELGG much more than a weblog … more a weblog on steroids and with attitude 🙂

What do I mean? Well, if I can identify other users with similar interests registered on the system, form my own 'club' and invite them to join, and have control over who can read my postings or view my file uploads in a finely grained way then I've got the basis of a pretty powerful communication, socializing and learning toolset.

Also, since what my friends say, or the files they upload, are of interest to me what about a system that provides an alternative weblog view which aggregates my friends' postings with my own and enables me to access resources they have declared shareable with their groups of 'friends'?

Some things in ELGG do need refining, e.g. the aggregation of 'friends' blogs requires finer control so that a user isn't overwhelmed by postings from other users. Aggregations of postings from a user's self-defined groups would be more useful. Also, while I love the fact I can upload a file and set my fine grained permissions so that only my groups can access it this does mean there could be a lot of copies of the same resource being uploaded into the system by different people. Some sort of searchable library/repository of files/resources would enable users to make an informed decision about whether to make an individual upload or not would be handy.

ELGG is certainly a user-centric environment which puts a lot of power into the hands of individuals and not necessarily the institution. Being open source, however, I could envisage an institution modifying ELGG so that central systems defined users, groups and communities. Perhaps a good compromise would be for central systems to do that but leave users with the ability to define their own as well.

So how could we use ELGG? Project groups and research teams should certainly be interested in the communication and sharing emphasis. And, yes, ELGG certainly fits into the ePortfolio category which was its genesis; but the more I looked at it the more I came to the conclusion that it can be much much more than any of this. It's certainly possible to support a 'course' with ELGG so this brings me back to the key question, i.e. is ELGG an example of a weblog as the model for a new type of VLE?

It's free to try and it's going to be open source so it would seem to deserve the recognition and support of the HE community. Let's hope it gets it.

For those wanting further information, a useful orientation is a recording of the live webcast on The Learning Landscape: a conceptual framework for ePortfolios that the developers David Tosh and Ben Werdmuller delivered recently (Macromedia Breeze presentation) via BCcampus. There's also some more very useful online tutorials available from the ELGG site (also Macromedia Breeze).

Just to round things off; there's a new Auricle podcast in which I interview David Tosh, one of the developers of ELGG. During the interview we explore some of issues above in a bit more depth. Just click on the 'Podcast' icon at the bottom of the righ-hand menu or set your podcasting application to http://www.bath.ac.uk/e-learning/Download/podcasts/auriclepodcasts.xml.

For the technically minded, the interview was recorded using the open source Audacity sound recorder/editor and Skype, the 'free' VoIP system. David was interviewed at his home in Edinburgh and I was based in my office at Bath. IMHO the quality is very acceptable and it sure beats jumping on a plane with an audio recorder and travelling to Edinburgh (much as I love the city) or doing an interview over the plain old telephone system without access to expensive recording equipment and a second telephone line.